Best Pinterest Tips and Tricks - Creative Uses For Pinterest.com

The Best Pinterest Tips and Tricks - Fabulous Secrets for using this addicting website!

Who DOESN'T love Pinterest? Seriously, it has got to be one of the best new social media and bookmarking products in recent years. With a seemingly simple idea (use a picture as a webpage bookmark and share it with your friends) this has become a wild phenomenon!

There are dozens of ways that people have learned to use this site creatively. Whether you are planning a family vacation, shopping for the newest Star Trek gewgaw, or organizing your favorite recipes, there is a tip in here for you! Many people have even found ways to use Pinterest to market their company, build a brand, and develop an active following for their organization.

Read on for some of fandom's favorite Pinterest Tips and Tricks - and leave some of your own in the comments! We would love to hear from you!

Do you Pinterest?

Fun Tip #1: Add a price in the description and the pinned image will include a diagonal banner with the price. My Little Cthulhu is pretty reasonable!

Add a Price

Have you seen those diagonal banners crossing some of the pictures? That is created by including the price of the item in the description. When you pin a product, simply add a description like "My Favorite Stuffed Cthulhu $18.99" and Pinterest will automatically add the $18.99 as a banner in the corner.

This is a great help to save people the effort of having to open up the link to find the price. Efficient, clean and elegant, this is clearly one of the top tips on how to use Pinterest effectively.

If You've Never Used Pinterest Watch This!

Organize and Arrange Your Boards

This is one area where the fine art of organization is extremely important. All of your pins are organized on "boards." A properly named board will make it easy to find the contents. I don't recommend heading down the ultra-OCD path and naming them in accordance with the Dewey Decimal system, but some well-thought out names will serve you well later.

Oh no! What if you change your mind later and want to add a new board? That happened to me earlier this year when I realized my recipe collection board was getting way too cluttered. I created two new boards ("Family Favorites" and "Baking") and spent a bit of time moving pins to those categories. I don't know about you, but it seems like I end of making the same dinners each month - so I thought it would be a good idea to organize them in a smaller, but more frequently used folder.

How many cooking folders do you have?

Stop the E-Mail Madness!

As much as I love Pinterest, I get bombarded with email notifications that someone re-pinned an item I posted. For a while, it was fun to see them grow in popularity, but it didn't take long for my email box to become bombarded. Learn the Three Easy Steps to Stop Pinterest Emails.

A Recipe Collection

OK, you probably just read about this above, but it is worth mentioning in more detail here.

Use Pinterest to collect recipes. Have you ever misplaced a recipe that you wanted to make for dinner? You searched as much as you could, but couldn't find where it was in your cookbooks, or your recipe cards, or your email - You get the idea!

Save yourself the effort and pin your favorite meals in well organized boards. There is no need to go scrounging through the dozens of cookbooks or stress over locating the grease-stained recipe card - all your meals are organized nicely right from the site.

Are you Addicted?

How often do you Pinterest?

Interact with Blog Readers

Do you run a blog or have your own site? Want to engage your readers more and increase traffic? Here are some tips to help bloggers use Pinterest to improve their readers' experience!

Plan A Trip

This is a very smart tip! Let's say you are planning a family trip to the Nation's Capitol. What on earth should you do? Search for Washington DC and click on "Boards."

Note: Their search engine defaults to searching for Pins, so overriding that to look at the Boards will get you a different set of ideas.

Once you find things that pique your interest, pin them to a Family Trip board of your own. I recommend naming it along the lines of the destination area to help other pinners on their trips!

Look below at some of the boards I found for Washington DC. What can you find for your trip to Paris, Miami, or the San Diego Comicon? I bet you will be pleasantly surprised!

What should you do? Search by the city and click on Boards. Odds are that someone else created a board with highlights from your destination. Read about their ideas!

Use this Pinterest Trick to Organize the Items on Your Bucket List!

Do You have a Bucket List?

What are ten things you want to do before you die? Skydive? Visit Africa? Hike through the Pacific Crest Trail? Watch the ball drop on New Year's Eve in Times Square?

Everyone has things that they want to do before they die. Why not record them in a board for YOUR bucket list? You might even get lucky and have your husband find a Valentine's Day idea in there. Ok, only if you're REALLY lucky, or he is in a LOT of trouble!

But seriously, keep your dream adventures consolidated into one location to remind yourself of your goals. Seeing them every day will improve your odds of completing them. Need help figuring out what you want to do? Look at other pinners' bucket lists for ideas!

Does your child like LEGOs? A quick search finds ideas from CubeDudes to making curved LEGO art pieces.

How to Pin from your iPhone

It's easy to pin while surfing the web from your home computer, but how do you do it from your iPhone? Simple! Follow this link from your iPhone for the step-by-step instructions!

Gift Selections

This is my absolute favorite tip! I pride myself in finding the perfect gift for people. It has to be creative, thoughtful, meaningful, and special. There is a lot of pressure, right?!?! Pinterest just became my new number one shopping idea book.

No, they don't sell anything, but thousands of people before you have pinned cute or creative items that just might pique your interest while looking for a gift.

Got a 10 year old boy who likes LEGOs? Do a quick search on the site and come up with more ways to use LEGOs than you could have ever imagined.

How about your husband who loves the Zombie series Walking Dead? Search for it and be amazed at all of the creative ideas people have found for Zombie gifts.

Toggle the Secret Switch to YES if you want to create a Secret Board. No one will be able to see it except for you and anyone else you invite! | Source

Add a Secret Board

This is an exciting feature! You can create a board, just like you do for anything else, but you can make it "secret." What that means is that the only people who can see it are you and anyone you invite to it! These will always be found at the bottom of your list of boards.

Step 1: Click on your name to go to your profile.

Step 2: Scroll to the bottom of your boards and click on Add a Secret Board.

Step 3: Name your board and assign a category.

That's it! Of course, you can always click on the Add a New Board button and toggle the Secret slider to Yes.

I like to use this for gathering gift ideas for other people throughout the year. I don't want them seeing it, but I love having all of the ideas in one place. This is a fantastic addition to the Pinterest site.

Catch a Laugh

People post the silliest things here! There is no need to open up your email to read the latest joke or see the crazy things that happened. Instead, open up the Humor section and prepare to laugh!

A word of warning here: There are some pictures and words that you may not want your children to see, so please preview the page before kids walk into the room. Adult content is not allowed, but there is no shortage of profanity in the pictures.

Market Your Etsy Store Products

Do you have a small business on the side? I love how so many people market their items on this site. It's a perfect platform for those creative Etsy store items.

If you are really smart, you will track what products are bought that were pinned frequently. At a minimum, track the 're-pins' and the 'likes' to help gauge demand for particular items. Your hand-sewn Al Gore-sock-puppet may not be as widely popular as you expected! Experiment and see what this demographic find appealing.

Want to know what is re-pinned a lot? Click the Popular Option

Are you interested in the most popular items on the site? Simply click on the "Popular" option as circled in the picture above. Find out what is re-pinned the most!

Create a Reference Library

I wanted to learn some new crochet techniques and found a huge amount of links to helpful websites. I expanded my searches to knitting, scrapbooking and even decoupage . If you can dream it, someone pinned it! The problem I quickly encountered was how to keep my favorite tutorials organized. They simply got lost in my generic craft boards.

Instead, I created boards titled "Knitting Tutorial" and "Crochet Reference." You get the idea. This is a fabulous way to keep the very specific type of helpful sites organized. I bet you're thinking the Dewey Decimal System isn't too far off now!

Collect and Organize Tutorials by using Pinterest.com

Enjoy it from your Cell Phone

Yes! There's an app for that.

Apple's iTunes has a free app for Pinterest. An easy download and look for your favorite pins while you are on the go!

Find the Best Craft Patterns

Tired of scouring dozens of blogs for the latest felt animal patterns or new knitting yarns? Odds are that someone did the work for you and pinned the most popular and cutest items already. Check out the new pins in the 'DIY & Crafts' category for some amazing finds from the farthest reaches of cyberspace!

Ever heard of Amigurumi? Check out the picture below for the newest patterns for these adorable Japanese crochet patterns. Yup - found them on Pinterest!

Amigurumi and other adorable crochet and knitting patterns are all being pinned right here!

Here's a Tip: Go to http://pinterest.com/source/hubpages.com/ to see all the pins that link back to Hubpages! Pretty Great Trick!

Search for All Pins to a Specific Site

This is one of the best tricks out there! Let's say you want to know all the pins that link back to a specific site. Why? If you have an Etsy store, this tip will help you find what products were repinned the most. You will be able to follow trends and see what flopped. What a great, real-time tracking tool!

Just enter the link below (replace the [Web site URL] with the site you are interested in.)

http://pinterest.com/source/[Web site URL]/

I use this to see what other great crochet patterns a blogger has posted. Odds are, if I liked one of her patterns, I would like more! Scrapbook and knitting ideas are the same way. I usually find that an designer has a lot of related items I like!

After opening the details of a pin, look on the left hand side of the page (I circled it in red) - and you can directly link to other items pinned from that particular site. Pretty slick trick!

Another Way to Search for a Specific Site

Another way to accomplish this same search is by clicking on the domain name of the subject site on the left hand side of the page.

I circled it in red in the picture to the right.

Have fun and experiment with this!

Search for the tag "costume" and find phenomenal inspiration pieces like a LEGO minfig!

Costume Ideas

Are you a huge Halloween fan? I am! I am always looking for creative costume ideas and love to see what fun things people have found throughout the web.

Mix up your search and see what you can find. I love the popcorn costumes (which we made for my son this last year) and the LEGO mini fig costume shown on the right.

What did you find that served as inspiration?

Store Inspirational Home Ideas

Early in my marriage, I would cut pictures of home decorating and layout ideas from magazines and paste them in a scrapbook. I dreamed that when we had enough money, we would design and decorate our house and used those pictures to inspire us.

Well, enter the new age of social media and bookmarking! Instead of a dusty scrapbook, I went digital and created a few boards to collect ideas on how we want our dream house to look!

Create your own Gift Registry

Do you have a wedding coming up? A birthday? A just-because-I'm-me day? Create a board titled Gift Registry and pin some of the items you want. Your friends and coworkers will appreciate the ideas and will certainly save disappointment from your only friend who DOESN'T use Pinterest!

I must say that Pinterest has become a new craze. Thanks for making the readers aware of the creative uses of Pinterest.

I will surely keep these tips in mind.

Holly 4 years ago

I'm just starting to use Pinterest as more than ideas to create. I like this posting as it's relevant to what I am trying to create. And I realize I need to clean up my pinterest a bit!

DATALOAD 4 years agofrom Michigan

Thank you for all the ideas. I like the idea of creating a bucket list pin board.

Sally Gulbrandsen 4 years agofrom Norfolk

This is a very informative Hub with loads of hints on using Pinterest. It reminds me to get back to my own Pinterest pages to do a bit of a tidy up. Thanks for sharing.

lesliebyars 4 years ago

I use Pinterest but you showed me some new things thanks for the info my friend.

chukwunonso samuel 4 years ago

super-fantastic hub i love it, more than i even love the pintrest. thanks for the hub it educative

marion langley 4 years agofrom The Study

I have heard so many good things about pinterest that I have been avoiding it thinking it might take over my life. This article makes me feel like I could jump in without the learning curve. Thanks for writing!

L M Reid 4 years agofrom Ireland

A very interesting and useful article about how to use Pinterest to our advantage. I pin my hubs and other writers hubs too. I do get a lot of traffic from the boards back to my articles.

Great tips so have tweeted and voted up

Audrey Hunt 4 years agofrom Idyllwild Ca.

Thanks for all the interesting advice - Pinterest is where its happening. Good hub!

Sheila Brown 4 years agofrom Southern Oklahoma

I love Pintrest! It is so addicting I have to make myself stop after an hour or so! I use it to pin my hubs as well as other hubbers hubs that I find interesting or useful. I didn't know how to add prices on pintrest and have been wondering how it was done. Thank you for the information! I have a Zazzle store at this will be very helpful! Voting this up, useful, interesting, sharing and pinning, of course! :)

Rambo Fen 4 years agofrom Raipur

I am sure i am not going to get so much info anywhere else.

Thanks.. It was really helpful

Christine 4 years agofrom Dublin

Very interesting hub thank you for sharing.

Garlic Angel

Audrey 4 years ago

I'm shy to admit that I have not had a good look at Pinterest. When everyone already has an account there, I still haven't open one yet!

Anagha V Mahishi 4 years agofrom Hubli, karnataka

Wow there is so much you could do with pinterest! I'm actually not much in touch with this website...I signed up 6 months ago, but faced difficulty in being visible, but now will try out what is mentioned in this hub... Thanks for such a useful hub...Voted up!

Faceless39 4 years agofrom The North Woods, USA

Wow, tons of information, well written, and great formatting. Well done!

Voted up, useful, awesome, and interesting.

FlourishAnyway 4 years agofrom USA

I have an account but am a little frozen with where to go next. Thanks for the ideas.

Linda Bryen 4 years agofrom United Kingdom

Thank you GinnyLee for a great hub about Pinterest, I just joined a couple of months back and have at least 3 boards for my Pinterest and still trying to learn how to use the site properly. Your ideas are quite good. Thanks.

Cat 4 years agofrom New York

GinnyLee,

You probably just coined a new phrase; virtual hoarding. I think I might have a problem, admittance is the first step to recovery right? :-)

Cat

Author

Ginny 4 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Thank you Cat! I appreciate it. I love spending time on Pinterest and I think I have more boards on recipes than I could ever make. It is almost like virtual hoarding! Thanks again!

Cat 4 years agofrom New York

GinnyLee,

This is excellent. I'm so new to Pinterest and I do like it because it seems relatively simple, but there were things that I wasn't even aware of before reading this. Like pricing, I don't know if I've had a reason to use this yet, but who would think about it if they don't even know it's an option. You broke it down really simply. Excellent job!

Voted up and awesome!

Cat

Jim Laughlin 4 years agofrom Connecticut

Some great tips I wasn't aware of!

Author

Ginny 4 years agofrom Arlington, VA

WeabeDab, this article is through HubPages, so no coding is required. I hope that helps.

WeabeDab 4 years ago

Howdy are using Wordpress for your blog platform? I'm new to the blog world but I'm trying to get started and set up my own. Do you need any coding expertise to make your own blog? Any help would be really appreciated! learn how

Christina Mendoza 5 years ago

This is such a helpful, informative and enthusiastic explanation of the many ways Pinterest can be used. I found it via a pin, and I'll be repinning it to my Pinterest board.

I'd like to invite you to visit my website, www.pin4ever.com, to get a free backup of your pins. It isn't well known, but lots of people have had missing pins due to hackers, accidents, and computer errors. Our Pin4Ever backup can protect your pins, and it's so quick and easy, we've saved almost a million pins already!

Kimberly Vaughn 5 years agofrom Midwest

I love pinterest! I mainly use it for recipe collection. I have never thought of some of these ideas before, like gift idea organization. The new hidden boards option definitely helps with organizing gift ideas.

Mary Craig 5 years agofrom New York

I've belonged to Pinterest for some time now but never really knew what to do with it ;) Thanks for this great hub. You really could do PR for Pinterest!

Voted up, useful, and very interesting.

Sam Little 5 years agofrom Wheelwright KY

This is a great hub. I really enjoyed reading it and hope to implement this into my pinterest usage. Thanks.

Richie Rosen 5 years agofrom Florida

Your Hub is awesome! I have been trying to understand Pinterest for a while now. You made it easy to understand. Thanks, Richie

Samith Jhon 5 years agofrom Los Angeles, California

Thanks for creating this very informative hub I'm going to share this on my Facebook & other social profiles.Really good tips about the pinterest.

Tammy 5 years ago

Does anybody know how to add pinterest to Tictail?

kartika damon 5 years agofrom Fairfield, Iowa

Great job - you really know the ropes on Pinterest!

OrangeGal11 5 years agofrom PA, USA

What a very comprehensive hub! Inclusive of so many ideas and tips.... thanks heaps! :)

Lori Colbo 5 years agofrom Pacific Northwest

Great hub. I pinned it.

Heather Jacobs 5 years ago

Great hub! I never knew you could do so much with Pinterest! I just joined Pinterest (after simply visiting it without joining for quite some time) and it really is a great site.

cityalice 5 years ago

Great resource for pinterest, I only discovered it a few months ago and already love it. The pictures are the best and really tells a story about a person seeing what photos they liked. It's like a way to see someone's personality through their repins and likes. Interesting hub.

LauraGT 5 years agofrom MA

Amazing hub, with great ideas! The first thing I did on pinterest was to go through all my old recipe clippings, find the recipes online, and create recipe boards. I love having them all there for easy access. I love the idea of using it for present ideas!

Author

Ginny 5 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Gypsy Rose Lee, you can upload your own pin! Log in to Pinterest and click on the "add" tab on the upper right hand side of the page. The middle selection of the pop-up is "Add a Pin" and you can upload your own picture.

Gypsy Rose Lee 5 years agofrom Riga, Latvia

Thanks for sharing and great info. Passing this on. I will have to read it more carefully. I do have one question - can I upload my own pics?

J.J. 5 years ago

Hello Ginny,

After I read this post I created my own Pinterest boards, however, None of my pin appears in the public feeds or in their specific category feed, they only appear in Everything feeds. I have read the below articles:

And so I tried my best to gain credibility with original pins, but still zero visibility...I now have over 100+ pins, but I see people with about 10+ pins that have all of their pins in publish feeds...

Do you have any personal suggestion on what I can and should do to gain my visibility and access to the public feeds? Please help, my Pinterest Boards:

Great uses! Another way I use pinterest is to get ideas for decorating my apartment.

Kebennett1 5 years agofrom San Bernardino County, California

Great Read with awesome ideas. Thanks.

SuperHealthySam 5 years ago

Oh I am one who is certainty addicted to pinterest! LOVE IT! These are some really awesome ideas! I especially loved the gift registry! That's a great idea, I think that may be getting used more and more in the future!

Great article!

Mahaveer Sanglikar 5 years agofrom Pune, India

Very useful Hub, thank you for sharing it.

craftybegonia 5 years agofrom Southwestern, United States

Thank you for this useful and informative hub. I'm a Pinterest girl myself. I am getting traffic from it and getting new re-pins every day so it is well worth trying.

Lamia Walker 5 years agofrom UK

Great hub - uses for pinning never before conceived. Really helpful!

hvacunits 5 years agofrom Longview, TeXas

Wow what a great Hub. I voted it up! And I am now following you. I am new at Pinterest and liking it so much.

derma 5 years ago

just joined pinterest, looks great.. just learning.. thanks for article

teacherjoe52 5 years ago

Thank for the great helpful tips.

dbialecki 5 years ago

Wow lots of information on this new tool. I'll have to go try this stuff out. Thanks!

Stuart Goddard 5 years agofrom Bradford

The mix on Pinterest is what makes it so appealing. A bit of everything..Love it. I also had to wait a bit to get my invite..

darrensurrey 5 years agofrom Surrey, England

One thing I find Pinterest useful for is fitness motivation. I "follow" a few fitness boards and every day see new motivational images.

Lisas-thoughts101 5 years agofrom Northeast Texas

Ginny Lee,

I have been using Pinterest about a year but had no idea all the uses for it. The information here is great. I am also going to read your other hub on "stopping the email madness" because I am bombarded. Thanks in advance for that one, too. I voted up and useful!

Lisa

Graham Gifford 5 years agofrom New Hamphire

More and more people are catching on to Pinterest with the help of Hubs like yours that direct them how THEY can use it to their full advantage. I've been using Pinterest for awhile now and love to read articles on how other people are using it and what boards they're creating. Thanks for sharing, GinnyLee.

Best Regards

Kim Lam 5 years agofrom California

Very interesting hub! I've just joined Pinterest a week ago and have had success with traffic. Now I'm addicted. Thanks for sharing your ideas. Voted up.

jamila sahar 5 years ago

great hub ! now i know about the price tag, i hope you will follow up with more useful hubs. i preferred the original design that didn't have the big picture on the top because sometimes i have to change the first picture because of the way it is cropped, i wonder if they will give an option to pick the what you prefer. but i still enjoy pinning. voted up and useful !

kelleyward 5 years ago

Great hub! Voted up and useful!

darrensurrey 5 years agofrom Surrey, England

Challenge accepted! ;)

Stuart Goddard 5 years agofrom Bradford

Pinterst is simply brilliant. fresh,new ideas,funny stuff,bikes,cars,and chicks. Only had one argument as well;););)

Nizam Khan 5 years agofrom Hyderabad, India.

I recently joined pinterest and it is an amazing service. Easy to manage pins and boards. Interesting and useful Hub. Thanks and voted up :)

darrensurrey 5 years agofrom Surrey, England

Great hub. "My first Cthulhu" made me laugh out loud.

ronakbhatia 5 years agofrom Mumbai, India

Pinterest is addictive an it already receives over 16 million visitors per month.

Emma Kisby 5 years agofrom Berkshire, UK

I love Pinterest and the different ways you can use it. In fact I really must sort out my pinboards as they are looking a little cluttered!

Great hub on a fun and clever site.

Blogurl 5 years agofrom Connecticut

Dawn, the images come from pretty much anywhere. I tend to repin many images that other pinners has pinned already. I also upload my own images or pictures. As you come across images online, use the pinmarklet to pin the images from that page. Sometimes researching a topic is helpful. Here is another Hub which explains all three of these methods. https://hubpages.com/technology/whatsinapin

Thanks again GinnyLee for this inspiring hub!

Hope this helps.

dawn 5 years ago

I'm new to pinterest and the question I have is, where do you get the images? do you just go to google and search images and pick ones you like? Are you concerned about the websites that the images come from? Once I find an image, then I'm researching if the site that it comes from is a good site, this takes forever to pin one image, HELP

Blogurl 5 years agofrom Connecticut

Great Hub! You have some great ideas here. I love Pinterest and I am happy others do to. Let's keep it amazing! Happy Pinnint.

livelovelaugh5 5 years ago

Thanks for the great tips! I've been on Pinterest myself butdidn't know some of the things you mentioned above. Thanks for sharing!

Great tips in this hub is a motivation to start well in there. Thank you.

Sam Kear 6 years agofrom Kansas City

Great ideas, thanks!

RedSoxFan 6 years ago

Great article!

kayyluh 6 years ago

I am a pinterest and hubpages addict! Pinterest is one of my favorite sites I can never get off, I love it that much! It really helps all of my creativity flow, what about y'all? Thanks for posting about Pinterest I loved this hub! Voted up and awesome:)

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Stugod, I highly recommend naming the boards to align with the topics. Right now, the search engine in Pinterest can find boards with the keywords in the title. You want to make sure that your pins are as easy as possible to find.

Stuart Goddard 6 years agofrom Bradford

I just joined and it really took off. Seems to be tailing off now. Can anyone tell me if it is an advantage to name your boards with the same name as pinterest topics.

Brian Lokker 6 years agofrom Bethesda, Maryland

This is an excellent introduction to Pinterest. I just joined Pinterest, and it's really helping to get me started.

Donna Cosmato 6 years agofrom USA

What excellent suggestions! Like you, I find my boards can easily outgrown a generic categorization so your tips were extremely timely. Voted up and bookmarked! PS HP Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors; loved the Cthulhu plush:)

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Thanks for the comment Maria! We are BIG planners in my house - and I love collecting ideas on places to visit, things to see, and activities to do with my son when we are on vacation. There are some very creative ideas that people have put together. It also makes for a great photo album of things you did.

MariaDoyle 6 years ago

Thanks for the info. I use Pinterest for so many things but never thought about using it to plan a trip. Good idea!

Bill Holland 6 years agofrom Olympia, WA

This was really helpful; thank you for this hub and thumbs up all the way.

Shell Vera 6 years agofrom Connecticut, USA

Ginnylee, I can possibly see myself joining soon. The more I look around it, the more functionality and usefulness I can see for my life. I especially like the ideas of planning parties in advance, saving recipes, and can see it being useful for cleaning and organization tips. Still debating...

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

thank you iguidenetwork. I suspect it will continue to grow in popularity over the next year or two.

iguidenetwork 6 years agofrom Austin, TX

A lot of interest in Pinterest right now - good tips!

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Susanm23b, I am glad you enjoy it. I stumble across ideas for things to do in various areas of the country, and I make sure to pin them. I have pinned Aquaboulevard in Paris to a treehouse hotel in Oregon. I love collecting these fun ideas!

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

EyesStraightAhead, the site is extremely fun! You will find it to be much better than Facebook (at least I do!)

It can take time from your day, but I find that the benefits and usefulness far outweigh the time-sink. I keep all my recipes organized and start planning parties far in advance by pinning party ideas.

I see many women pinning ideas for their weddings - everything from wedding cakes to gothic dress to hairstyles for bridesmaids.

jenniferg78 6 years agofrom Philadelphia, PA

I just joined pinterest last week so this post is really helpful! I have created some basic boards but nothing more than that. So thanks for all your help- now I can be an advanced user.

susanm23b 6 years ago

Love Pinterest. My daughter is on every day! You have some great suggestions that we had never thought of such as the "plan a trip" and being able to search for a specific site. Thanks for your great ideas!

htodd 6 years agofrom United States

This is nice and interesting post..Thanks

Barbara Radisavljevic 6 years agofrom Templeton, CA

It can be addicting. One must use self-control -- especially at the beginning when you are setting up your boards. I hope I've gotten past that stage. There are just to many other things to do.

Shell Vera 6 years agofrom Connecticut, USA

Very interesting. I do not see myself joining the site but appreciated being able to read this in case I change my mind. Do you find that you spend a lot of time on the site? It seems like one that could easily suck up even more time than FB does!

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Catron - you are smart to ask about sites that allow you to use their images. You must have permission to use pictures. I suspect that the copyright issues with using the site will be very interesting over the next several months. The owners of the pictures won't make any money off of your reuse, but they might allow it if it creates more traffic to their site.

Great hub! You taught me a few things I didn't know about Pinterest that I will now use.

Catron Williams 6 years ago

I am having a problem finding sites that allow me to pin them. any suggestions? In particular Sarah Brightman.

thanks

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Thanks for the comment DIY! I also recommend looking at the "Popular" option at the top of the page. There, you will find the most re-pinned items. I find that is a good indicator of what people enjoy and it will help identify the products and styles that are attracting the most people.

It will help you adjust your niche for this predominantly women-based market. Good luck and please post a link so we can see your shop!

DIYweddingplanner 6 years agofrom South Carolina, USA

I love Pinterest and have found it to be a great resource in my wedding business. I didn't think about using it as a plug for my Etsy shop, so good article! I'll come come back to this one.

Robin Edmondson 6 years agofrom San Francisco

I have personally pinned a few articles by other Hubbers that I thought would be useful to my Pinterest followers. It's a great way to showcase your Hubs and other Hubs that you think would be interesting. :D

Author

Ginny 6 years agofrom Arlington, VA

Wow! Thank you everybody for your kind words. I think Pinterest.com will be a huge force to be reckoned with in the social media universe. I suspect it will continue to grow and really fill a great niche. I know it has already made a huge difference in my house. I hear my friends asking if I had "pinned" something and figured that once it became that common of a term, it would really be something big!

I thought it was great to see how many pins originated from HubPages! Do you have any articles that have been pinned?

Kelly Umphenour 6 years agofrom St. Louis, MO

Fabulous! I just joined yesterday so reading this probably saved me tons of time on the learning curve:). Thank you so much, you did a beautiful job here!

Robin Edmondson 6 years agofrom San Francisco

I love Pinterest, but have been on a bit of a hiatus lately. It can take up so much of your time! I didn't know how to add prices to your items, that is a great tip that I will definitely use in the future! Fantastic, informative Hub!

Christina Lornemark 6 years agofrom Sweden

This is a great help since I just joined Pinterest! Thanks for a very informative and useful article. Bookmarked and voted up!